I love tools that engage students and promote their academic success. Using iPads one-to-one in my classroom has been an amazing experience! It’s my mission to share ideas that will make more teachers tech-savvy.

Monica: My name is Monica Burns, I am a fifth grade teacher in South Harlem in a Title 1 public school. I just finished my sixth year teaching 5th grade and my second year using ipads 1-to-1 with my students.

She gives new meaning to DIY teaching

Monica: I was never worried that the students wouldn’t be excited. I knew that they would just jump at the opportunity to come up and touch a SmartBoard and everything like that. I was the person in my building who found one in the closet and googled what kind of cords I would need that were missing, and tried to rig the whole thing up myself.

Which is why she is our teacher of the week

Monica: I think that it is really important to acknowledge the fact that students want to explore and are going to want to play, and that’s okay. I find that they are the ones holding things up and saying, “Did you know that this could happen?” and “Did you know that you could do this?” They are always finding the options and the little things that maybe didn’t pop into my head or weren’t my priority. We have the ipads on students’ desks all day long. They don’t take it home with them, we keep them in the classroom, but they are used in every subject area, every day. We do assessments on our ipads.

Congrats again Monica!

Monica: I think that teachers, administrators, and people who are petitioning higher ups to get this funding just need to start gathering examples. There are so many resources out there of videos of classrooms, of programs that are being successful where you can show someone who doesn’t get it what this looks like in a successful school environment. And I’m coming, again, from an urban Title 1 school with 89% free lunch where, in our school, the kids are thriving with this. So I don’t see why in any environment the success wouldn’t happen.